This is for information purposes and a wish...
In my last question i had asked about the compatibility of a specific laptop model from Lenovo. I missed the bus in trying to get hold of the model as it was discontinued without warning. I am currently using a Dell Vostro 3445 which originally shipped with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This laptop is a living testament to the quality of both Dell laptops and Ubuntu to say the least. The hardware is fine other than being a little slow as i am using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS now. My search for a new laptop ended when i realised that all comparable models of this capacity of durability was not only really expensive but shipped with 2 storage devices which was default of SSD. The regular HDD is being buried by all major brands in good configurations.
My thought was will 2 storage devices work? The only way i could find out was - practically. I got a small capacity SSD - Kingston A400 which was of 240GB. I replaced my old non-functional cd drive with my old existing HDD by a HDD Caddy.
I then proceeded to install Debian 11.1 as the first option. I was able to create partitions (manually) for the boot area, swap area, the "/" mount point on the SSD while the "/home" was my old existing HDD without any issues. The result was bootable with some errors which i thought as configuration issues. I then rebuilt my system with the backup of all data. Then i started the resolution process of what i thought as configuration issues. I was able to clear about 10% of it only to realise that the rest of the issues were driver incompatibility with the distro as it explicitly came up in the error messages. I had to leave Debian 11.1 out of the picture. Debian 10.11 refused to recognise the SSD as the primary storage which also left Debian 10.11 out of the picture.
I then proceeded to install Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (being a familiar OS) with a manual partition. I created partitions of - Reserved BIOS Boot Area, Swap Area (1.5 times my RAM as advised in old school) and the "/" mount point on the SSD. The "/home" was the old existing HDD. The installation completed without any error messages. On restart i saw some error messages flash past during the boot. They were too fast to be read. I redid the installation with utmost care the second time with the same result. I then restarted the system both with a net connection and without a net connection several times to make sure that it was usable. To my relief it is. I was able to configure the system to my old ones without any issues. I also rebuilt it with all the data from the backup and the system is now working with some issues at boot which i cannot read. This post is from the current system. I started at 7:30 AM in the morning and it is now 5:40 PM in the evening. A really taxing day for me.
My question - Was Ubuntu 20.04.3 made for dual storage devices or am i just lucky? In case it wasn't made then this is an area of working for the development team of Linux in general and Ubuntu as well. The dual storage devices are going to be the standard very soon from what i could gather looking at the configuration details of above average laptops. It's an easy thing to say but the amount of effort that is required to implement this seamlessly is enormous.
For me it will be nothing short of a miracle to find the complete support for dual storage devices in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but i do expect it in Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS which is my wish.
Thanks a lot for going this far with me and my post.
